Coffee heat rising

Brand-New Whole Foods…Meh?

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Sashimi_for_saleWell, that was disappointing.  This weekend I dropped by the brand-new Whole Foods market that just opened in the old, empty site of a long-defunct Linens ’n’ Things. It’s right next door to the Trader Joe’s where I often shop and just down the street from the new Sprouts. So I thought wow! This is gonna be great.

But…maybe not so much.

To begin with, the place was just mobbed, it being the first Saturday after the new Whole Foods opened. I don’t enjoy crowds, and I don’t like navigating chuckablock jammed parking lots. And I particularly dislike the type of crowd attracted to the joint: in this town, people who are very wealthy (or pretend they are) are so self-absorbed and so rude that you just want to kick the twits. They think they own the road, the parking lot, and everything around them. And as for dumpy little old ladies in blue jeans? They look at you with a sneer on their face if they happen to notice you, which mercifully isn’t often because most of the time they look right through you. They’ll run you down in a parking lot, they’ll run you down with a cart in the store, and they’ll actually push you aside if they get a chance.

This is not an illusion. It’s very noticeable in certain parts of the city and in certain shopping centers. Shoppers at the AJ’s at 67th and Union Hills  behave that way routinely, and you’ll see it at the Whole Foods on Mayo Boulevard in Scottsdale and at Kierland Commons in Scottsdale and at the Scottsdale Quarter…heh!

There’s a reason we call it “Snotsdale.”

Social issues aside, I wasn’t at all impressed with the store, once I got inside the thing.

At the outset, it was instantly clear the building is not large enough for a retail operation with such grandiose pretensions. They’ve crammed so much junk into it, so tightly, that there’s hardly any room to move around. So customers shuffle from department to department in ambling lines, like madding crowds at Disneyland.

Then they’ve filled what space they have with stuff that’s just out-and-out absurd. A juice bar, for example, where you can buy glasses of fresh-squeezed juices for upwards of $6.50. A sit-down eaterie/coffee house at the north entrance that forces you to wind your way through stunned-looking noshers (who, in the time-honored manner of their social class, will not step out of your way but feel it is their privilege to block all and sundry who wish to pass). Giant tubs of locally roasted coffee beans, with a giant roaster display thing taking up an enormous amount of space…but no espresso beans that I could find, BTW.

Most ridiculous, however — IMHO — is that they’ve installed a freaking bar, front and center!

No joke. There’s a bar at the front of the store. It’s billed as a “pub” and serves 87 gerjillion varieties of boutique beers, many on tap. Plus food and champagne and four TV sets tuned to sporting events. For your convenience, unless you’re stocking your weekend cabin at the Pinetop Country Club, you can even pay for a small number of grocery items while you’re hanging out in the bar.

Now, it’s not that I have any objection to a nice, fun bar. Au contraire. As you may have noticed, I tend to enjoy my boozie-poos to a fault. So I’m not throwing asparagus at the patrons of said bar. It’s just that…well, the merry din coming out of a successful bar is less than conducive to deciding whether this avocado is ripe, whether that Hawai’ian mango is a better choice than this Mexican papaya, whether you’d like a pound of ahi or a nice chunk of wild-caught salmon, and whether what’s needed today is a cab or a syrah. It’s not a background that I find very comfortable when I’m trying to shop for groceries.

It was very loud and very annoying.

There was a whole lotta drinkin’ goin’ on there. One Yelper even noted a customer walking around the store with an open beer. This means that driving in the vicinity of 20th Street and Camelback, which was already plenty chaotic, is now going to be downright dangerous at pretty much any time of day or night. Nothing like a responsible corporate citizen, eh?

Deciding never to return to that place was a proverbial no-brainer. Far more disappointing, though, is the realization that I also won’t be shopping at the Trader Joe’s nearest to my house anymore. I am not going to do battle with some rich bitch or effete twit over a parking space for the privilege of buying a few artichokes, no matter how excellent and inexpensive they may be.

Happily, the Trader Joe/Whole Foods combo exists at a much calmer venue at Tatum and Shea, across the street from a mega-yuppified Fry’s on the fringes of Paradise Valley. Both strip malls have parking that’s up to the job, and the design for that Whole Foods is not bat-sh!t inSANE. The store is much larger, which means it can accommodate fun clothing, 1950s-style make-up (which is what non-toxic, cruelty-free lipstick and mascara are: perfectly awful, waxy stuff reminiscent of the Avon products some of us can recall kiping from our mothers’ dressing tables and painting on our young faces), a very fine sushi counter, and all the fancy foods and drinks you crave. With plenty of room to move around without being bowled down by the Entitled set.

The intersection of Tatum and Shea is a far piece from my house. However, by the time I reach Home Depot, I’m halfway there. When I’m on the college campus, it’s on my way home (more or less). And when I was a young thing living in the effete lawyer’s and doctor’s ghetto that was the gentrified Encanto district, I used to drive to Tatum and Shea at least once a week to do my grocery shopping, since there wasn’t a decent supermarket in the Phoenix city limits after Stan Felix’s redoubtable Madison Pay ’N’ Take It closed down. At least not that any of us could find at the time.

So it’s not that big a deal. It’s just…what? déjà vu, in its weird way?

Image: Nigiri sushi for sale at Tokyo supermarket. MichaelMaggs. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Shifting the Credit-Card Cycle: An Unexpected Outcome

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You may recall that along about the first of this month, I came up with the wacky-sounding idea of artificially forcing my American Express billing cycle, which runs from the 21st to the 20th, to coincide with my real-life monthly budget cycle, which runs from the 1st to the 31st. To accomplish this, I used savings to pay off the credit-card charges made during the last ten days of August and reset my personal charge-card budget to begin on the 1st of each month and end on the 20th, resolving to use cash to cover discretionary costs for the last ten days of the month.

This would insure that I never buy things with money that’s not already in the bank account. It would allow the same monthly amount for discretionary spending — $1100 — but simply reduce the portion of that amount allocated to put on the charge card. Instead of putting $1100 on the charge card each month, I would put $745 on the card and pay for the remaining grocery and other discretionary bills with $355 in cash. Or less, depending on how much remained in the budget when I got to the last day of the credit-card cycle.

Well, here we are at the 21st. How did the scheme work?

It actually seems to have packed a little surprise.

Wouldn’tcha know it, this month brought two big, unplanned expenses: the pool’s backwash valve handle snapped off — $192 to fix that damn thing — and I bought a new back-saving chair for the TV room, one whose design will force me to sit up straight and not fall asleep in it. The chair cost $600.

I’d figured to pay for the chair out of savings. The two hundred bucks for the pool repair, though, had to come out of the grocery budget, since savings has been raped once too often of late. Yesterday, finding the cupboard running toward bare and the piles of paper on the desk nearly touching the ceiling, I went through all the receipts and bills and entered them in the spreadsheets. Unless I’ve made a mistake (always a possibility), something weird has happened:

When all is said and done, if I can keep purchases over the next nine days down to $180, I should only have to raid about $150 out of savings to pay for everything, including the chair and the pool repair.

There’s enough money in the checking account to cover almost all those expenses, assuming I don’t go berserk in the next week & a half.

How to explain this? Normally outgo matches income each month, right to the penny. But this month, I come up with almost $640 in wriggle room. And yes, that is after projected expenses right up to the 30th.

Could changing the amount budgeted to spend on credit cards make that much difference?

That doesn’t seem to make sense. Thirty days is the same as thirty days, no matter what period the thirty days spans.

I spent about $110 less in Costco this month than over the previous 31-day cycle. Although that doesn’t account for a $640 windfall, it’s an interesting development.

On average, I spend $295 a month at Costco. That covers food, household supplies, personal items, clothing, wine, the annual purchase of chlorine tablets for the pool, and the occasional small appliance. In July/August, I spent $318 there; between August 21 and today, $207.

It occurs to me that shopping at Costco may run up monthly expenses, even though in theory buying in bulk should keep costs down over time. And that’s bizarre: not having to run to the grocery store every time you turn around to buy toilet paper, detergent, and paper towels at inflated prices should save money, not jack up costs.

WTF?

I think the problem may be that Costco is Impulse Buy Central. And it’s that way because of a specific merchandising strategy:

You know that anything you see in that place is likely to be gone the next time you visit. Even things they seem to carry as staples — those wonderful camis, for example, and the incredible Borghese mineral make-up — eventually disappear from the shelves. So if you spot something that you think you’re going to want sometime in the near future, you buy it now, even though you don’t need it now.

You buy things you don’t need immediately because you suspect that in two weeks or so, when you’ll be back, the store will no longer have it.

When you think about that, it’s a brilliant piece of marketing, eh?

Since the start of this budget rejiggering scheme (August 21), I’ve shopped in Costco three times. But between the first and today, I spent only $85 there, hoping to preserve as much cash as possible to cover the last, charge-free ten days of the month. That’s because I’ve restricted purchases to only those things I can’t find anywhere else. Otherwise, I shopped in grocery stores.

Not even Whole Foods has the vast array of impulse-buy temptations presented by Costco. Instead of buying for future needs and grabbing that pair of red Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and snatching the cool little highly portable handy-dandy shop vac, I’ve been buying only what I actually need at any given moment. Even if that costs more than buying staples and household goods in bulk, I spent fewer dollars because when I’m not exposed to things that I don’t really need right now, I don’t buy them.

It still doesn’t account for a $640 windfall — there must have been more money in the account at the end of last month than I realized. However…it’s telling.

I’m thinking that a great deal of money could be saved, month-to-month, simply by staying out of Costco. The store does carry some things I can’t find easily anywhere else, certainly not for the price:

• tomatoes with flavor (those Campari-brand tomatoes actually taste like tomatoes, and they cost a lot less at Costco than cocktail tomatoes at other stores; their flavor is better, too)
• Glorias (jeans that fit grown women)
• chicken and pork for the dog
• dog veggies (frozen vegetable mix with no corn, onions, or artificial flavorings)
• chlorine tablets (vast savings!)
• toilet paper in lifetime supplies
• paper towels in lifetime supplies
• walnuts, pecans, and pine nuts
• cheap wine
• hard liquor in lifetime supplies

Really…that’s not very much stuff.

Maybe buying everything else in smaller quantities at other stores would push monthly costs down, even if the amount paid for certain things (meat and fresh produce, for example) would be higher.

Geez. If I could recover even $200 or $300 a month out of the budget — to say nothing of $640! — my life would be so much better! I could actually DO some things, rather than just getting by from day to day. Imagine being able to afford to go to shows, buy some decent clothes (new, not second-hand!), and go out to a restaurant without feeling guilty. Maybe afford the gas to drive up to Prescott or over to Bisbee now and again.

Imagine that.

Stupid People

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Argh! We’re surrounded by Stupid People.

No. 1 Stupe would be moi.

Left the house before dawn this morning, for the daily two+ miles through the neighborhood. Knowing the sun would be glaring in my eyes within twenty minutes, I took my favorite old pair of prescription shades and hooked one temple thingie over my T-shirt’s collar. After one turn around the park, I ran into my friend Harriett, and we proceeded further, yakking away.

So busy was I with talking I failed to notice when the glasses fell off my shirt and tumbled to the ground. Not until I walked in the front door did I realize I’d lost $200 worth of wire and plastic!!!!

Irreplaceable wire and plastic, we might add. No matter how much I beg and plead, I can not persuade a glasses dispenser to give me a new pair of glasses in this old Rx. They insist on using the new one, and not once in god only knows how many years has a current prescription been as strong or as effective as this pair. God damn it — officious bastards.

I’ve got one last pair in this old prescription — clear ones, not shades — that I use for night driving. When they’re hanging on my nose at night, I can see the road clear as a bell. My regular glasses in the current prescription? Really…I shouldn’t be driving with those on at night. It’s not a “night vision” problem; it’s a the goddamn prescription isn’t strong enough problem.

Oh well. Stupid me: now I’ve lost an indispensable tool that I won’t be able to replace.

Speaking of stupid, in the gray dawn hours I came upon the couple who take their great Dane to the park and let it run loose for an hour or so. Stopped to chat and pet the Dane — it’s much smarter than its humans, though they’re kindly and gentle creatures. As we were strolling toward the park, I mentioned, in a friendly way, that I had a German shepherd that hated dogs and would fake “friendly” until the other person’s dog would get within reach — and then she would rip into its neck.

This didn’t register.

“I couldn’t take Anna to the park because people would have their dogs off-leash and she would harm any dog that came up to us — that meant my poor dog never got to take walks at all.”

Dumb as posts: this didn’t register, either.

Later as I hike up the east side of the park I see the male dolt standing out in the open hollering. The dog is way the hell and gone over on the west side of the park — bear in mind that this plot of land is a full mile around.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog…

The dog ignores him.

Eventually, after about eight or ten minutes of this nonsense, the dog starts to move vaguely in his general direction.

Over on the other side of the park, the female dolt is sitting at a park bench. She now takes it into her head to call the dog over to her.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog…

So what they have there is a big, honking clown of a dog that does not come to call and that they allow to run off a quarter- to a half-mile away from them in a public park used by people who may be afraid of dogs, people who may dislike dogs, runners who look like prey to dogs, dogs that may be protective of their owners, and maybe even the occasional German shepherd that craves nothing more in life than to wag cheerfully to lure over the stray pets of morons who let their dogs run loose and RIP THEIR GODDAMN THROATS OUT!

You think I jest, don’t you?…

Having discovered the glasses were lost, I jumped on my bike and retraced my steps, to no avail. Over, again, on the east side of the park, I encounter the air-head who rides her bike with a big mug of coffee in one hand and a large energetic pit pull trotting along beside her. Off-leash, of course.

We see each other every day and say hello, so I ask if she’s spotted a pair of shades on the ground. She says she’ll keep an eye out for them. I stop to say hello to the dog, which, while not slaveringly chummy like the Dane is at least fairly mellow if unchallenged. For godsake…she doesn’t even have a collar on him!

What part of anything that scares this animal, like a car wreck nearby or a fire engine flying past or a German shepherd trying to remove his jugular vein, will cause him to run off does she not understand?

This dog probably could have held his own against Anna. Maybe. When she worked herself into a towering rage, she was something to behold. I don’t think I’d care to come up against her even if I were a pit bull.

Speaking of stupes, Other Daughter and her schizophrenic husband have a little tortoiseshell tabby that they dote on. They let this animal run loose in the neighborhood, being of the species of moron that imagines leaving the cat out is somehow good for the cat. Nevermind the pack of coyotes who’ve taken up residence. Nevermind the cars. Nevermind the delinquent across the street who thinks it’s fun to lay rubber on the block-long road in front of your house. Kitty must go out.

Welp, Kitty has moved in to my yard. She likes to sit on the wall around my front courtyard, and she marks the gates with plenty of spray. Pulling Cassie loose from that delicious stink-fest is quite a task, when it’s time to take her for a walk. Cassie loves cat stink. I could do without it.

But what I could especially do without is having this damn cat use my backyard as a toilet. The desert landscaping in back is crushed granite…approximately the texture of cat litter, which is exactly what Kitty thinks it is. Yesterday I’m sitting in back reading the paper over my morning coffee and what do I see but Cassie nosing up something and happily munching away on it.

Yup, you guessed it: cat shit.

Why do dogs like to eat cat shit? Why??????

WhateEVER…I don’t want it in my backyard.

So the question now arises: how to keep these morons’ cat out of my yard?

I suppose I could go up to the pound and get my own pit bull. Problem is, you can’t leave a dog outdoors in the heat here. Some people do, but that’s another variant on Stupid. It’s cruel to start with, and a fair way to shorten your dog’s life to end with.

As a practical matter, Anna the GerShep and Walt the Greyhound did a pretty fair job of keeping the cats out of the backyard, because they could go in and out at will through the gigantic dog door I carved in the back wall. Anna liked to go out and take the morning air now and again, thought she didn’t spend more than half-an-hour at a time in this hobby. That, apparently, was enough to discourage cats from taking up residence.

However, a pony-sized dog is not the only thing that can go in and out that dog door… Especially after the Garage Invasion episode, I would just as soon leave it bolted shut. Because Cassie won’t use a dog door, I’ve become accustomed to the old-fashioned way of serving the hound’s needs (pay attention and get up off your duff when the dog goes to the back door!). And I have no desire to change back to the Burglar Entry method.

Besides, why should I have to take on the expense and hassle of another dog because stupid people can’t take care of their cat responsibly?

No, you can’t trap a cat and take it to the pound. Well, you can. But what will happen is that if you try to leave it off there, they will charge you ninety-six bucks! The pound and the Humane Society here are so overrun with feral and stray cats that they don’t want people to bring them any more! So they hit you with a stiff gouge for turning in a stray cat.

The alternative is to trap the cat and take it up to Lake Pleasant and drown it, or simply to let it loose in the desert to be eaten by coyotes (not until it’s devastated some more of the native birds and small creatures, we might add — cats are hell on native wildlife). This activity, however, is illegal. It has been deemed animal cruelty. And the law will put you in jail for a good long time if they catch you dumping a cat.

And that brings us back to the question of how to keep these people’s cat out of my backyard.

I could resurrect the dragon’s teeth, strips of nails I tied up there to keep Son-in-Law from jumping the fence after the interlude in which he told Semi-Demi-Exboyfriend that he would come into my yard whenever he felt like it.

Hm. Now there was a time when the hassle and expense of owning a German shepherd was worth it. LOL! She caught him coming in the side gate. He never tried that again. 😀

The dragon’s teeth are very tacky. And really, I do not feel like drilling holes in 2-inch strips, pounding nails through them, and wiring them to the top of the wall. Like I don’t have enough to do with my time?

Satan and Proserpine, the house’s previous owners, bolted a strip of vine lattice along a short stretch of the west wall. I think they did it because they wanted some privacy, because they never planted vines there. And in fact, it does work to block the view from my neighbor Terri’s westside window. Which is moot, because she has heavy drapes that she never, EVER opens.

But the lattice has another effect: it blocks the cat from getting over the wall there. Too narrow for her to climb up on, and too high for her to jump over in a flying leap. I could, in theory, buy hundreds of feet of wooden lattice and bolt it to the block wall.

This would be a) expensive as hell and b) more hassle than the human mind can conceive.

Possibly the proposed pit bull would be cheaper and less of a nuisance…

I could super-glue broken glass to the top of the wall, in the Mexican mode.

This would be tacky, too, but possibly not as tacky as strips of nails. Also, during the SDXB-vs-Schizophrenic Son-in-Law adventure, I was advised that the police likely would look askance at a litter of broken glass along a wall, especially if an officer elected to jump the wall in pursuit of, say, a Garage Invader.

I could sprinkle mothballs on the tops of the walls. Unfortunately, these are toxic. If the cat knocked some on the ground (which it certainly would, because it jumps on the wall and walks around all the time), Cassie might get into them. Same effect when a breeze causes the paloverde or one of the other plants to brush across the top row of blocks.

Or I could wire or tie a layer of chicken wire along the top of the wall. That will be almost as pretty as the nail strips, eh?

Or maybe I could go out and buy several containers of cat repellent and sprinkle that atop and along the base of the wall. Reviews of such products look less than encouraging, though; 34 people panned the stuff at Amazon, vs. 21 who rated it great, sorta OK, or pretty much worthless. One reviewer suggested it would work well as a kitty snack.

Anyone who knows cats also knows that when you elect to do battle with one, the loser is going to be you.

HOOT! I can’t believe this…

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Closing in on the fat-killing goal, which I expect to make by the end of this week — possibly even tomorrow — I decided to drag out the hated blood pressure monitor and see what progress has been made in that department, if any.

Defies belief!

120/68, pulse 78

Holy macquerelle! That is a drop of twenty-nine points in systolic pressure since May 22nd, and twenty points in diastolic. Without benefit of prescription drugs.

That’s right: I threw over the Irbesartan because I didn’t care for the side effects. This is purely the result of eating better, losing weight, and exercising mildly.

I have not beat myself up with running or gym-crawling. I have not starved myself. I have not interrupted my drinking habit. Indeed, as we scribble I’m dosing myself with a gin & tonic. Not once have I felt in any way deprived.

This amazing result has come about as a result of these strategies:

1. Cut sodium intake from incidental and unintended sources.

• Quit eating two to four pieces of bacon every damn day of my life.
• Refrain from scarfing down sausage, pastrami, salami, and other kinds of salt-laden processed meat.
• Read the labels on packaged and canned foods! Seek out similar foods with lower sodium content.
• Eat less cheese, which is high in sodium.
• Avoid restaurant food, which is astronomically high in sodium.

2. Prefer real food to food-like substances.

• Avoid all processed food!
• Instead, seek out the most delicious of all possible whole foods, including candy-sweet ripe fruit, crisp fresh veggies, and delicious fresh greens.
• Buy the best quality food available on the market.
• Have at least one excellent salad a day, always containing a wide variety of good things to eat. Use a real salad dressing (not commercial bottled stuff) of olive oil and lemon juice, lime juice, or vinegar.
• Make nutritious soups in quantities large enough to provide several meals. I happen to like cold soups such as xergis and gazpacho, which are extremely convenient to eat and (if you use low-fat yogurt in the xergis) low in calories.
• Evade eating in restaurants, most of which sell little or no real food.

3. Eat less meat but better meat. Much, much better meat…

• Cut meat-centered meals to two or three times a week.
• Seek out…
…wild-caught fish
…humanely farmed beef, lamb, and pork
…free-range chicken
…antibiotic-free meat
…hormone-free meat
…air-cooled meat
…meat whose packaging specifically says no extra liquid (i.e., brine or saline solution) has been added

4. Eat smaller portions.

• Serve food on smaller plates, so that it looks like you’re eating the same pile of food but in fact you’re consuming less.
• Eat slower and enjoy your food  more.

5. Eliminate most starches.

• Refrain from eating potatoes, bread, and rice
• Include whole wheat in this ban
• Include brown rice, too
• And, alas, include the beloved PASTA! Oatmeal (the cookable kind) is OK, though…occasionally

6. Try to engineer about 40 minutes to an hour of moderate exercise a day.

• Walk one to three miles through the neighborhood
• Swim ad lib
• Indulge in yoga for relaxation and pain relief
• Bicycle when weather and traffic permit

None of these things (except possibly the business of staying out of restaurants) is difficult. None of them makes you feel especially deprived. Possibly the most difficult element is simply pulling them all together so you can engage them all at once.

The interesting thing about this is that once you do get all the strategies all engaged in a single project, falling off the wagon once in a while doesn’t seem to make much difference. Despite the shocking frolic at Tricks the other day, I still hit my goal of dropping to 132 pounds the following morning. And the weight did not go up a day or two later, in some sort of delayed revenge.

I think what works is to develop an effective plan, to engage it, and to turn it into a routine. The plan should not be so extreme that you can’t reasonably stick with it over the long term — and by that we mean “for the rest of your life.”

And speaking of the rest of your life, check out this interesting study, which suggests that pursuing whole foods and exercising moderately may actually reverse the ravages of aging. If you read what they report having tested, you find that the men in the study who achieved not only less aging but apparently reversed aging did exactly what I have described here. It’s pure serendipity…but it seems to work.

Cheers! 😉

The Queen of the Universe vs. the Queen of Sheba

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P1010644Her Holy Highness The Queen of the Universe has been more than usually imperious of late. She’s developed a limp, and because she desires not to walk around the Castle, she barks at the Slave to come to wherever she happens to be. Usually the command is to pick up a ball and toss it (gently) for her delectation. Sometimes, however, the desired behavior is unclear.

The Slave, a.k.a. the Human, a.k.a. the Queen of Sheba, undoubtedly communicated the wrong message to Her Holy Highness today, elevating her beyond the level of mere Queen of the Universe to Empress of All Time, Eternity, and Hyperspace.

Yesterday the Slave slow-cooked a mound of pork for Her Highness’s delectation. It was too hot to food-process into manageable choppings, and so it was spread out upon a dinner plate, covered, and set inside the fridge for future reference. This evening, having presented the last of the chicken to the Queen of the Universe in the morning, the Slave ran the chilled, exceptionally greasy meat (dogs Queens like grease. A lot!) through the food processor. This left a special treat: a lovely plate smeared in grease and meat leavings, something Her Highness regards as quite the delicacy.

So the Slave piled up Her Highness’s dinner on said plate, so as to present both the Royal Dinner and the Royal Delicacy in one fell swoop. A rather silly exchange ensued:

Slave: “Here’s your dinner, Cassie…”

Majesty: [wag!]

Slave: “You good dog, you!”

Majesty, internal monologue: “Now what brought that on? Must have been the imperious barking at the miserable, lazy creature. Interesting. It likes to be barked at. After this, lots more barking!”

{sigh}

The Slave has been eating like the Queen of Sheba, and so it deludes itself that it is the Q of S.

I picked up a pound of spectacular wild-caught salmon at Sprouts yesterday — four meals’ worth! — and this evening decided to grill a piece deliciously over the backyard BBQ. Dinner was simple: the magnificent salmon with a lush salad of crisp greens, crunchy carrot, lovely blueberries, zingy scallions, buttery avocado, and tasty walnuts. And it was marvelously luxurious in its simplicity.

Diet? What diet?

In all this disappearing of 25 pounds over the past few weeks, the Queen of Sheba has never gone hungry. And most of the time what I’ve had to eat has ranged from very nice to incredibly delicious. Tonight’s dinner fell into the latter category, thanks (I believe) to the “less meat but LOTS better meat” strategy.

Meanwhile, the Queen of the Universe and Empress of All Existence beckoned.

The Queen of Sheba Slave parked itself in front of the television to scarf down its chow in front of Antiques Roadshow, something it apparently favors because it itself is an antique.

Her Majesty deigned to carry Ball into the room, by way of getting the creature’s attention.

That’s when I noticed that for the second night in a row, Her Highness is limping badly.

Last night I thought she must have pulled a muscle chasing Charley the Golden Retriever around. Or trying to protect him: believe it or not, she FAKED A BITE at my son when he was hauling Charley into the pool.

Charley doesn’t exactly like going into the drink but he will try, unhappily, to climb onto the steps when the humans are in the pool. Also we discovered that the only time he’ll hold still to have his tail combed is when he’s petrified in the water.

CharleyWhiteMtsWhile he and his human were camping, he managed to build a large mat in the beautiful flag-like fringe that is his tail fur. M’hijito didn’t know what else to do but take a pair of scissors and cut it out, thereby destroying some of Charley’s roguish beauty. The Slave, having been a young girl with long hair and a fierce mother sometime in her remote past, realized that the mat could probably be teased out with a hair pick and a comb, if the hound could be made to sit still long enough. Hence: the Hair Salon on the Pool Steps.

As M’hijito was lifting Charley into the pool for a second or third dip and he was trying to make himself heavy by way of resistance, Her Highness took a running whack at the offending human. That was a surprise!

It took about an hour to tease the tangles out, but eventually it worked. And it really, really, REALLY annoyed the Queen of the Universe. Mercifully, she didn’t break skin (only because she apparently didn’t intend to). But she certainly got the attention of the Slave and Charley’s Human.

At any rate, while Charley wasn’t being groomed in the pool, Her Highness was chasing him around the yard. Hence, I figured, a pulled muscle or strained ligament.

This evening, though, I found a big scrape hidden under the thick fur on her leg. it runs from below the “elbow” joint almost up to her shoulder.

Poor little Queen! No wonder she’s limping.

So now her leg is slathered in antibiotic ointment and wrapped in bandaging, presenting an amusing challenge to Her Highness: she’ll have all that off by morning.

Don’t like to see her hurting enough to limp (one critter in the house doing that is enough!), but am sorta glad it’s an actual injury, probably the result of skidding through the gravel in pursuit of Ball, and not arthritis or a dislocated joint. In a few days it will heal and then she’ll be back to normal. Hopefully a less barkifarious normal.

Never a dull moment here in the Queendom!

Changes

by

{sigh} Feeling a little better now.

RHDonating my beloved old Restoration Hardware easy chair and ottoman to my son’s cause made me feel weirdly sad. I mean, how stupid, huh? Feeling depressed over a 15-year-old CHAIR???????

The back and leg have been hurting so much I no longer can sit in most of the furniture in the house, certainly not for more than a few minutes at a time. The big, comfortable (…well, formerly comfortable) chair in the TV room presented several problems:

• The seat’s depth is longer than my thighs, so my feet don’t touch the floor. That’s never mattered, because the big ottoman turned the thing into a kind of chaise longue, perfect for parking in front of the television with a computer on your lap.

• It has such a nice big seat, and its soft overstuffed arms are at exactly the right height for curling up and falling asleep. And that’s exactly what happens, no matter how hard I try not to fall asleep in front of the mind-numbing television.

In either event — whether I sit there with feet up on the ottoman and a computer perched on my lap or whether I actually try to watch the television with the sound muted through the endless stupid advertising and end up falling asleep while waiting for the program to come back on, the result is agony. Just sitting in the chair long enough to watch a program or write a blog post causes leg and hip pain. But holy mackerel! Falling asleep in the damn thing invariably leaves me with such violent, awful sciatic cramps I can barely crawl down the hallway. A couple of times I’ve thought I wasn’t going to make it to the bedroom.

Ugh.

I dragged in a wooden chair from the back porch, made a cushion for it, and tried sitting in that.

It’s not too bad. Sitting in anything causes pain, but chairs that force one to sit up straight cause less pain. It’s apparently loafing, slouching, and curling up in a ball with your head on a chair arm that cause serious hurting. A smaller chair that allows the feet to rest on the ground helps, and also there’s no way anything larger than a cat could fall asleep in the thing.

The other chair in the TV room is a very pretty, very useless wicker rocking chair I got on a whim from Pier One. Like most Pier One furnishings, it looks good and feels…well…pretty awful. LOL! I have yet to find a comfortable piece of furniture at that place. So it’s a decorator item, not a chair.

LilyChairCopenhagen Imports sells a small, leather-covered swivel chair that I’ve always found extremely comfortable and that’s small enough to let my feet hit the ground. It’s about the same size and shape as the outdoor chair…just looks as though it were intended to be inside. If I put the laptop on a TV table, I can sit here for a half-hour or forty-five minutes without too much consequence. I imagine the softer seat will extend that time a little.

So I gave my beautiful easy chair to my son. And he wasn’t real happy about it. The thing has a (very faded, very tired) rose-patterned slip cover, which he hates. He thinks it’s unmanly.

To replace the slip covers will cost about $460 for the chair and another $250 for the ottoman, and that’s on the low end. He can’t afford that, so even though new slip covers probably would extend the chair’s life another 10 years (it’s otherwise in fine condition), it ain’t gonna get any restoration work.

So it made me sad to give it to him, because he didn’t much want it.

But what really made me feel sad was just having to get rid of it. Being forced to get rid of a beloved object because of a growing disability.

It feels like the first step toward the day when I’ll no longer be able to live in my home. That time is coming. Maybe not soon. But eventually it will get here. And then I’ll have to lose this place that I’ve come to love and that I really don’t want to empty out and leave. Certainly not to have to go into an old-folkerie.

Very, very sad, that echoey, empty room.

Well.

I got out the throw M’hijito gave me a Christmas or two ago. It happens to have the same colors as the cushion and pillows on the wicker rocker — reds with green and turquoise accents. For that reason I got the Copenhagen chair, which will be delivered next Wednesday, in a dark brown leather (it comes in a wild spectrum of colors): so it will match the coffee-colored wicker. The wooden yard chair is brown, too…so the throw kind of gives the idea of how this new throne is going to look.

Then, dog notwithstanding, I pulled an old area rug down from a closet shelf. It goes with the curtains and also picks up some of the colors in the pillows and throw. And of course it absorbs enough sound to bring a stop to the empty-cave echo effect.

And actually, it looks pretty nice.

So I suppose there’s no reason to be so forlorn about the stupid rose-covered chair. I just don’t like changes, is all.

Interestingly, as we get older we seem to like change less and less. It’s oddly disorienting…leaves you feeling at loose ends, in a funny way. Something that shifts your environment, when you’re an old bat, makes you feel out of sorts, unhappy, restless.

Why? I don’t think it’s because your marbles are starting to slip out your ears and bounce down the road.

No.

As your options, slowly and imperceptibly, grow fewer, a change represents something that you may never be able to undo and that very well may not be to your advantage. Or to your taste. Many things that are for the best are not necessarily to one’s taste.

By and large, I could do without them — changes.